These writing process quotes will inspire you. A writing process describes a sequence of physical and mental actions that people take as they produce any kind of text.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging writing process quotes, writing process sayings, and writing process proverbs.
Best Writing Process Quotes
- “I hate writing, I love having written.” ~ Dorothy Parker
- “Writing is a struggle against silence.” ~ Carlos Fuentes
- “I love the structural part of the writing process.” ~ Kate Morton
- “My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what’s going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.” ~ Joan Didion
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“The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.” ~ A. B. Yehoshua
- “I really enjoy the writing process because I can do it from my house. I can create these characters and take them in the different directions that I want to take them. You have a lot of freedom as a writer.” ~ Ricky Schroder
- “In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.” ~ Doris Lessing
- “The writing process is sort of like when you’ve got no electricity and you’ve gotten up in the middle of the night to find the bathroom, feeling your way along in the dark. I can’t hardly tell you what I do because I really don’t know.” ~ Carolyn Chute
- “My writings are an exploration, and I think a lot of writers would tell you this, but in writing, you’re not simply putting down things that are already known to you. You’re actually discovering in the writing process, you’re actually creating knowledge.” ~ Alan Lightman
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“I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and go with the moment and go with my guts.” ~ Quentin Tarantino
- “Anxiety is not only an inevitable part of the writing process but a necessary part. If you’re not scared, you’re not writing.” ~ Ralph Keyes
- “The writing process, the way I go about it is I do whatever the beat feels like, whatever the beat is telling me to do. Usually when the beat comes on, I think of a hook or the subject I want to rap about almost instantly. Within four, eight bars of it playing I’m just like, ‘Oh, OK. This is what I wanna do’.” ~ Eminem
- “The writing process is not just putting down one page after another-it’s a lot of writing and then rewriting, restructuring the story, changing the way things come together.” ~ Rebecca Stead
- “In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.” ~ Doris Lessing
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“My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.” ~ Amy Bloom
- “There is a fine line I have to walk throughout the writing process in a novel. It is this line between drama and melodrama, and it is this line between evoking genuine emotional power and being manipulative.” ~ Nicholas Sparks
- “The writing process is very much like being in a dark tunnel, and you don’t really know what you will end up with until you have created it.” ~ Emily Haines
- “If you get trapped in your head and out of your body during the writing process, it’s very easy to make wrong turns. You have to really be in touch with your heart rather than your head to write the novel you want.” ~ Soman Chainani
- “For each of my novels, I’ve had something of a eureka moment of deciding what world I want to set it in – Wall Street, the pop-music industry, Harvard – and what the very vague contours of the narrative might be (which typically get changed a lot through the writing process).” ~ Teddy Wayne
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“I just thought it was important that people knew right from the jump that I’ve got problems. But in all seriousness, that’s a huge part of my writing process.” ~ Joshua Mohr
- “In live-action, writing, production and editing happen in discrete stages. In animation, they overlap – happening simultaneously. This allows a real dialogue to occur between the writer, the director, the actors and the editor, and it makes the writing process a lot more collaborative and a lot less lonely.” ~ Michael Arndt
- “I love to play with language; make it do tricks, turn a word inside out to see if it’s got a hidden meaning tucked away somewhere, or perhaps find that it’s capable of an extra entendre or two. . . . Plotting is nothing I did, or do, naturally. It is the hardest part of the writing process. No matter how many times you plot a script successfully, the next one, representing new and uncharted territory, convinces you that you really don’t know how to do it at all.” ~ Larry Gelbart
- “Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.” ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee
- “My writing process is very organic. I start with an idea. I have the general story arc and the cast. But then I sit down to write, and things change.” ~ Sarah Addison Allen
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“My writing process is ritualized and monotonous, but there’s no other way to get the job done. All other fiction writers I’ve met say the same thing.” ~ Douglas Coupland
- “When I write, I don’t allow the fear of consequences to interfere with the writing process. I have in the past paid for my commitment to the truth and the way I live my life. I am prepared to pay more if I have to.” ~ Taslima Nasrin
- “The reader has information about the characters that the characters themselves don’t have. We all have our secret sides. Even I come to understand things about the characters only through the writing process, as I am going along.” ~ Jaume Cabre
- “What I didn’t realize is that the writing process for comedies is that you do your table read, and if you aren’t funny on that first day during the table read, they take your jokes away and give them to somebody else.” ~ David Morse
- “To me, everyone goes through that at some point in adolescence, you know. There’s – you meet someone when you’re a young teenager, and they’re never right for you, and you always wind up hurting someone on the way to figuring out all this stuff. But it was a fun writing process.” ~ Don Hertzfeldt
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“As a writer, I have to find platforms that can use this writing process. The internet is one of them.” ~ Paulo Coelho
- “There are still songs that I’m writing. I like to write. I like to take a long time to do my songs, not even the actual writing process, but conceptualizing, getting into the songs. That’s why I stopped doing mixtapes.” ~ Lupe Fiasco
- “It is a bit more challenging for the simple fact that now the stories I am writing are relying more on my imagination than on facts, more on research than on memory; so it is basically a slower writing process, more reading, more exploring. On the other hand, this approach is a little bit relieving too, since many times while writing [How the Soldieer Repairs the Gramophone] I felt too close and equal to my character.” ~ Sasa Stanisic
- “It was always very important for us that we presented ourselves as a band, because it’s a three-part writing process and it’s a three-part decision-making process, it’s not two producer guys and a girl that sings the songs. It’s startling how many people make that assumption.” ~ Lauren Mayberry
- “The recording process was basically me meeting with different writers, going into their studio, starting a song and just hanging out and chatting and getting to know how they work. Everybody has a different writing process so there was a lot of getting to know people, which can be fun and stressful at the same time.” ~ Bridgit Mendler
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“I have enjoyed writing songs for so long… it felt like in order to make music that I could relate to myself, I would have to be a part of the writing process.” ~ Bridgit Mendler
- “We don’t think about how the songs are going to translate so much during the writing process. Once the song is recorded, and once we’re mixing, that’s when it occurs to me. Then you start rehearsing to play shows. I never concern myself about how we’re going to pull it off live, because I know we’ll figure out a way to do it.” ~ Tad Kubler
- “What I did with my first records was, my writing process was that I didn’t touch any instruments to write it, so I was making it all on the computer, and really the arrangements were coming first, the intricate thing.” ~ Annie E. Clark
- “I felt that in a way, I hated the writing process so much. It’s excruciating, as I’m sure you know, and so lonely being in the solitary prison of my office. A lot of brain-wracking. It just felt like it was so much hard work, and I would send it away. I felt as though I was doing all of this heavy lifting, this weightlifting, every day, all day. It was excruciating. And I stayed skinny, and someone else got all the muscles. I was eating all my vegetables, but then I wouldn’t get dessert. To me, directing is the dessert.” ~ Shane Black
- “So much of my writing process is trying to eliminate any kind of shame or fear of the thoughts that I’m having. Where I would usually backspace, I stop and say, “You know what? This is important, that I say how I feel and don’t sugarcoat it, and don’t avoid it.” In my experience when I do try to avoid something, it makes its way into the work anyway. To be in front of it and just make friends with it is easier for me.” ~ Morgan Parker
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“I start casting early in the writing process, so I can tailor the script to the gifts of the actors.” ~ Judd Apatow
- “The first splurge of creativity is kind of free, and the last 30 percent is painstakingly hard work, but it’s good to light a fire and make it public and create that expectation. It’s become part of the writing process, really, a way to ask the audience what they think, how they think it’s going. I can’t write songs in a vacuum.” ~ Andrew Bird
- “The biggest challenge in the research process is to let go, to stop, to say enough, and then to reduce all of that beloved labor down to a few succinct paragraphs that shape the background to your narrative. I love research – that’s all the fun, especially in the field. To write, however, is to suffer, and my pieces usually come in thousands of words over the assigned length. That’s a serious flaw in my writing process – shaping and disciplining the footlockers of material one has so happily gathered.” ~ Bob Shacochis
- “I’ve also been writing with my guitarist, Ted Barnes, and he’s amazing. Writing with him has taught me a lot about my own writing process, in the sense that it’s incredibly personal to write with someone else from scratch.” ~ Beth Orton
- “Each book starts from ashes really. I don’t feel that I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell or that story to tell, but I want to be occupied with the writing process while I’m living.” ~ Philip Roth
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“My neck is too arthritic to snap around. The big shift in my perspective that happened in the writing process, however, was the paramount importance of the “West” epitomized by Cincinnati.” ~ Charles R. Morris
- “I felt differently about her [Gypsy Rose Lee] during every phase of the research and writing process. Often, I felt incredibly sorry for her; she had an extremely difficult childhood and a complicated ‘to say the least’ relationship with her family, her mother especially.” ~ Karen Abbott
- “I try to listen to a lot of music when I’m in the mixing process of a record, when I’m in post-production and trying to get everything to sound a certain way. During the writing process, I tend not to listen to too much music. I obviously wear a lot of influences on my sleeve, but if I was listening to too many records, I would turn into too much of a monkey.” ~ Jay Reatard
- “I used to always throw in random questions. I’d have to ask about artist’s single and their writing process, which I know is every artist’s most-hated question, like, “Well what was ,your process?” And it’s. like, “Well, I wrote this album.” And then at the end I would throw in, like, “So, Seinfeld or Simpsons?” and they’d be so thrown because everything else could be autopilot. All my greatest moments were from the most sporadic questions.” ~ Ruby Rose
- “I don’t play a lot of instruments so when it comes to the songwriting process I don’t have a lot to do with that. A lot of times it’s just acoustic guitar and a small riff that produces a song. Ultimately you want to write a song that people are going to enjoy and that you love to play, most importantly you have to write it for yourself first.” ~ Barry Kerch
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“In a lot of senses, things are definitely changing in my life, and with what’s going on around me. But I still feel like the writing process is as intimate as it as before, if not more. Because I need my time more than I had before.” ~ Angel Olsen
- “When the initial little impulse comes it just tends to come. I wake up in the middle of the night, or I’ll be swimming in the pool with my kids and just think, “Can’t forget that one.” Then there’s the more organized side of the brain, which is when I choose to work on them. I’ve learned through a bunch of mentors how to demarcate the different times for your writing process. I keep multiple projects going at once and there’s a time when no matter what you’re doing, you have to stop and write it because it’s coming.” ~ Mark Duplass
- “My writing process is very feedback-based – I listen to the audience. I try to understand what’s connecting, what’s not connecting… and then rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. Chris Gethard and I have been on the road a lot together. When we get on the bus at night, we talk about the jokes that didn’t work and the joke possibilities that could work. I think this is a little different from other writers.” ~ Mike Birbiglia
- “I don’t really know how writing process happens, how these songs are arrived at. One of the things I like about the writing process is, I don’t necessarily know where it’s going, and even if I think I know where it’s going, it’ll turn out different. I find that exciting and rewarding.” ~ Richard Thompson
- “I have no one else involved in the writing process. I would hate to feel that I was going into the studio with something wishy-washy and not done. It’s because I’m a control freak, so I want to know that everything is sorted and what’s going to come out the other end, obviously with a bit of leeway.” ~ Marika Hackman
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“My writing process is very feedback-based. When I do stand-up, I listen to the audience. I try to understand what’s connecting, what’s not connecting, and then rewrite, rewrite and rewrite.” ~ Mike Birbiglia
- “I’m pretty critical, but I’m also pretty good at letting go once it’s done. There’s this existential argument that comes in, at some point, when you’re over-thinking the songwriting process. There’s no guarantee that the more time you spend or the more you concentrate on certain aspects that that’s going to produce a better result, especially in the arts. Some of the most brilliant things that someone might do could happen in three minutes because it’s something that just occurs to them.” ~ Chris Cornell
- “The thing is that I don’t normally think in terms of manga when I’m writing. Sounds odd from someone who has is getting a reputation for doing manga-related work. But I would say that my scripts are NOT manga at the stage of my writing process, they are just comic book stories in a more general sense.” ~ Sean Michael Wilson
- “Some sounds are coming from the keyboard and they are very important in the writing process, but on the other hand, we have melody and we have the song before, so if the keyboard sound fits very well, it takes its artistic direction. We play the machines and the machines play us.” ~ Nicolas Godin
- “Actually, I very much dislike routine. Creating music is my chaos therapy. The writing process puts me in a good place. Recording the music is the release of however I felt in the song.” ~ Mpho Koaho
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“I don’t see myself directing things I don’t write because, to me, directing was just an extension of the writing process.” ~ Danny Strong
- “The level at which my OCD enters my writing process isn’t that I slap the keyboard – it’s more along the lines of a compulsive need to swap syllables around, rework words and sentences – I revise for the pleasure and satisfaction of it, rather than out of a sense of duty.” ~ Jonathan Lethem
- “Everybody has their own approach to songwriting. When you’re an electronic musician, the whole writing process just depends. Some people have a very live way of writing electronic music, very improvisational. They set up a lot of gear and do live takes. I’m concerned with having a specific kind of sound. There’s not one second that I haven’t put thought into. I put almost as much time into my live shows as I do into writing music, but they’re two completely different processes. Some people think the way I perform live is how I write songs, which isn’t true at all.” ~ Travis Stewart
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“So much of my writing process is trying to eliminate any kind of shame or fear of the thoughts that I’m having.” ~ Morgan Parker
- “As I’ve evolved in life my writing process has taken a turn. I’m inspired by everyday life. I could be in the middle of something and hear a commercial. I enjoy songs writing themselves.” ~ Kelly Price
- “Every single word that’s on the screen, I oversee. There’s nothing that’s shot, I’m not involved in. The scripts go through multiple drafts, and I work with the writers on all these things. And I’m extremely involved in the writing process.” ~ Matthew Weiner
Writing processes are highly individuated and task-specific; they often involve other kinds of activities that are not usually thought of as writing per se (talking, drawing, reading, browsing, etc.)
